2.2

Sol, The Raven from Rome

I moved silently through their ranks, looking the sailors up and down. They stood frozen, waiting for something, the same thing that I was searching for in them. The closer that I looked, the more wretched that they seemed. Still too thin. Still too filthy and unkempt. All of them too crude, and not a single awakened soul to be found among them.

“I told you not to come back,” I said, and the man closest to me jerked back as if I’d slapped him.

“But the eagle came to us-!”

“And how far did he have to fly to find you?”

The men shuffled their feet, ducking their heads or casting their eyes to the side.

“We told you to make better lives for yourselves,” I said. “We told you to be free. Twice we offered you your choice of tomorrow, and twice you chose to stay instead.”

They shrank away with every word, unwilling to accept my message but unable to speak out against me in the wake of what they’d seen me do to Olympia’s dock city.

“You’re all too weak to sail the course I’ve charted for myself.”

Their backs hunched. Their fists clenched and unclenched. Impotent. Undisciplined.

“You should have followed Kabhur’s example,” I told them frankly, because it needed to be said. “You should have gone home.”

“What home?” a boy snapped. The unruly pirate child, the one that had shot my brother with an arrow the day we assaulted the slavers he’d kept company with, glared down at me defiantly. Beside him in the crow’s nest, Selene looked down with clear concern.

“Whatever home you chose,” I answered. “You should have sailed this ship to paradise and sold it once ashore. You could have lived comfortably. You could have done anything you desired, lived any life you wanted.”

“Not like this!” The pirate child heatedly denied, banging his fist on the edge of the crow’s nest. “We sell this ship, we’ll never see her like again! We sell her and we’ll spend the rest of our lives shoveling shit for slave wages anyway! We’ll never be a part of something like this again! We’ll die old and fat, wishin’ that we’d stayed!”

Bit by bit, I watched conviction straighten their spines. Not one of them disagreed with the irreverent child that had once had a hand in their enslavement. Not one of them had been swayed. They raised their eyes to mine once more, and though the terror and the awe made their pupils shake, they did not turn away.

They were the castoffs and the dregs, as Griffon had so kindly put it once before. They were men with nowhere to go, and nothing to their names. The only strand connecting them to one another was a desire for a greater purpose. Their only common ground was an insatiable hunger, a desire to be a part of something larger than themselves.

Emboldened by the pirate child, they added their voices to the mix.

“Don’t toss us out, captain!”

“Don’t leave us for the waves!”

“Let us stay, cap’n!”

“We can serve!”

“Please, captain!”

“We want to live-!”

Amidst the gently rolling waves, a monster exploded out of the foam.

Selene shouted a warning while Sorea beat his wings and took flight. The oarsmen screamed, flinging themselves away from the creature as it surged over the ship’s rails. But it was too late, and they were far too slow. The monster reached out with nails like sweeping daggers, each one of them a killing blow.

I caught the siren by her throat and crushed her slender neck.

The men tumbled over rowing benches, over each other, and failing that, over their own feet in their panic. They stared up at the foul creature, wide-eyed, as she thrashed against my grip and slammed her glossy scales against the deck.

“And they say fishing’s hard,” Griffon chuckled, appearing by my side while forty hands of his intent swarmed across the siren’s body, holding her in place.

The monster was half woman, half creature of the sea. She was nothing quite so terrible as the drakaina that we’d seen the Aetos brothers fight, more fish than serpent woman, and she had missed her opportunity to sing. Though she struggled harder than any fish, her snarling lips could do little more than hiss with my hand around her neck.

Of course, she was still a monster. No matter how hard I clenched my fist, my mortal strength was not enough to break her neck. She knew it, too. And though she was in no position to sway us with her song, that didn’t stop her from speaking out.

“Captain of salt and ash,” the mermaid hissed, her tone as intimate as it was cruel, “you have no place on this earth. There is no room in heaven for you, no punishment cruel enough that yet exists below. Look into my eyes and know that your luck will never turn. Look into my eyes and know that every word I say is true.”

“I recognize that ugly voice,” Griffon leaned in, golden hair shifting in the sea breeze. Golden light shone behind his eyes. “Hello again, Melpomene. I was hoping you’d bleed out.”

The mermaid’s expression became something truly ugly then, and her voice grew twice as venomous to match it.

“Son of scarlet sin-“

Griffon slammed the Scarlet Oracle’s adamant dagger up through the underside of the siren’s mouth, hooking her like a fish. Ichor like molten lead spilled from her split tongue, and for a moment the siren’s black hatred turned to terror. Then the muse returned, and the siren dislocated her own bones in an effort to slip free and tear my brother’s eyes out.

A holler split the air, and a plain old skinning knife scattered off the monster’s scales. Undeterred, one unawoken sailor threw himself bodily onto her tail and tried again, searching for a gap that his mundane knife could cut into. He was joined by another, this one hurriedly winding a length of rope around the thinnest part of the monster’s tail and the rail of the Eos, seeking to tie her down. Then came another, rushing across the deck with a rusty harpoon in hand. Then two more, each of them working together to raise a heavy rowing bench above their heads and bring it down on the siren’s back. Another, and another, all of them surging forward to lend their hopeless aid.

This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

Not a single one of their attacks did anything but incense the monstrous woman. Yet they fought, and they struggled, knowing all the while that it was in vain.

“Useless,” the siren slurred in Melpomene’s voice, contorting her sinuous body in a violent snapping motion. It wasn’t enough to shake my grip or Griffon’s, but it was enough to break the rope and send the swarming sailors crashing back across the deck. “Useless!” she said again, her voice rising mockingly as she directed her scorn at us. “Now, as then, forever more, useless-!”

Selene buried her spear in the monster’s naked chest, scarlet eyes burning bright, and the siren shrieked in ear-splitting agony.

The oarsmen staggered to their feet, spitting bloody phlegm and broken teeth, and surged back across the deck in a roaring tide. They threw themselves upon the shaft of Selene’s spear, adding all their strength to hers as she drove it slowly through the siren’s heart.